Hey Jono and Chris,I am really enjoying your aviation photos. Both the subject material and quality of photo is excellent. Well done.I particularly like the GE CFM56 powered Nasa DC8. It looks awesome. Such clean lines and with that determined mean look. I have a soft spot for the 8. I used to be an aircraft engineer in a previous life and worked on the DC8 (and DC10 which is another favourite). As part of my engineering apprenticeship I was based in Christchurch from 1978 to 1979 (Yes I know I'm old) working on the tarmac doing turnarounds for Air NZ, Qantas, Singapore, Ansett and briefly TAA or any other itinerant international arrival. (The latter 2 airlines operated 727s).it was a great place to be based and I especially recall enjoying the drive out to the airport on those cool, crisp but clear, winter days with the snow on the alps in the back ground. Another of my recollections was watching the DC8 or DC10 come down from Auckland in the morning to eventually go on to Sydney and back followed by the return to Auckland in the evening. In a strong crosswind (NW wind) we would often head out to the edge of the tarmac to watch the landing. Naturally we would place bets as to whether or not they would land. Rwy 29 was too short to land on so it had to be 02 or 20. There were some quite hairy landings and Go arounds and it was only later in life, when I started to fly in and out of there, that I realised just how tricky and unforgiving a good Nor west blow is in CHC. A totally useless fact but the DC10 used to land with it's centre undercarrage leg retracted. This was because if it landed with the centre gear down then the landing fees were charged at a DC10 series 30 rate and with the gear up it became a DC10 10 series (which didn't have a centre gear) and the landing fee was less. One of our jobs when it arrived back from Sydney was to manually lower the centre gear so that when it got back to Auckland it could depart for Los Angeles that same evening. It was quite a crude method but it involved depressurising the oleo strut, lowering the gear (the centre gear had s separate gear switch for this purpose), rolling it back manually until the gear locked in the down position and then reinflating the oleo strut with Nitrogen gas. Sorry I digress.

Keep up the excellent work guys. Maybe some video of those landings with in a strong NorWester!Chris I hope you get back to full health soon. Broken hip....ouch.